Change owner of internal hard drive partition from root to user

Did you try

sudo chown user:user

For example sudo chown cyrex:cyrex (User:Group)

if the partition is called party, your user is called cyrex and it is in /media just do for example:

sudo chown cyrex:cyrex /media/cyrex/party -R (The R is for recursive so it affects all directory/files and subdirectory.

As noted, the partition is NTFS so if is automatically mounted you need to make sure that the user that has permission is you. To do this follow this steps:

1. Go to console (gnome-terminal)
2. Type id -u. This should give you the user id you have which you will insert into fstab.
3. Open fstab sudo /etc/fstab and search for the line that is mounting the ntfs partition.

4. Assuming is something like this:

   UUID=1234532123 /media/amntfs  ntfs  defaults 0       0
   

   Add to it the umask, uid and gid masks like this

   UUID=1234532123 /media/amntfs  ntfs   defaults,umask=007,uid=1000,gid=1000  0       0

   Save the file and just reboot or remount the unit.

Here:

• The uid is your User ID. The one you got from id -u.
• The gid is you Group ID. Normally the same as id -u but you can check it with id -g.
• The umask is like chown but reversed.

See How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition? on more about using chmod/chown on NTFS filesystems.

All my NTFS partitions are owned by root, yet I can access them fine as user. It's a matter of mount options rather than ownership and file permissions (remember, it's a NTFS partition - you can't change any permissions there).

In my /etc/fstab the partitions are included as follows:

UUID=AB84274F84211B98   /media/WIN7     ntfs   defaults  0   0
UUID=CDBAF39E13A2AC2D   /media/DATA     ntfs   defaults  0   0
UUID=EFA980B33BA33DF5   /media/MEDIA    ntfs   defaults  0   0

where defaults are default mount options that already should do what you want to do.

To find the UUIDs, run sudo blkid.

See also: How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition?